APRIL 6, 2017 - Transnational Political Histories and Contemporary Refugee Claims: Eritrea and Its Diaspora

As part of the Gordon F. Henderson Speaker Series on Refugee History,
the Human Rights Research and Education Centre is pleased to present:

Transnational Political Histories and Contemporary Refugee Claims: Eritrea and Its Diasporas

The Horn of Africa country of Eritrea has been among the top refugee producing nations for over a decade and particularly visible during the recent so-called “global refugee crisis.” Yet, Eritrean refugees have been migrating to the global North since the 1970s. The Eritrean diaspora is therefore comprised of multiple political generations each rooted in specific historical moments in Eritrea’s troubled history. These various political generations, have all contentiously participated in an Eritrean transnational social field that conjoins Eritrean communities globally and the sending state. Their political and legal struggles – with one another, with the sending state, with societies of settlement, and with the legal regimes structuring their migration and protection claims – cannot be understood apart from the densely layered transnational history that continues to shape the unfolding present. To understand Eritrean refugee and asylum claims and their integration in societies of settlement, we must shift the perspective away from current refugee flows and concerns within societies of settlement to a historically informed transnational approach that prioritizes refugee experiences.

Speaker:

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights Program at the University of Tennessee. She is also the Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association and Associate Editor of the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review. Her research focuses on the transnational political and legal dynamics of Eritrea and its global diasporas. She is also researching the meaning of the missing and unidentified dead in Northern Uganda’s transitional justice process. She has published four university-press books including Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and more than twenty peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

*The Human Rights Research and Education Centre may take pictures at this event for use on the website.